Darth Vader Holds the iPhone 4 Wrong: Filmed and Edited on the iPhone 4

I wanted to test how easy it would be for a video editing novice such as myself to create and edit a multi-scene movie on the iPhone 4 using the iMovie app. So I solicited the help of LAPTOP staffers T.J. Fink and Brian Neal to create a movie about the iPhone 4 with the iPhone 4. And what better subject for such a movie than 3GS vs. 4? Inspired by Star Wars and far too much Diet Coke, we present our masterpiece:

As you can see, the video is made up of four different clips spliced together. The original clips also had some footage I wanted to clip out of the final cut. Adding video to the project was easy. And you can add new clips in front of, after, or in-between the existing clips easily.

Figuring out how to trim the beginning and end of a clip wasn’t intuitive at all. I finally figured out that if I tapped on the video, I could drag the orange bars that appeared and trim the beginning or end of clips. Still, this process wasn’t very precise. Though the app showed me how much I was trimming off in seconds, it was sometimes hard to figure out precisely where to stop dragging. Plus, the dragging motion wasn’t smooth or consistent. In the end, I was able to trim to my liking, but only after far too much effort. And because the process was so imprecise, I wasn’t able to hit the timing and beats as well as I wanted to.

There appears to be only one transition available — cross dissolve — but I got to decide how long the transition lasted. For this video, it was all I needed. One thing I felt was missing was an option to fade in at the beginning or fade to black at the end. I settled on adding an image at the end that I thought would make a good button on the whole thing. But I would have preferred a fade.

The audio from the iPhone wasn’t very loud, so a tool to tweak that would have been a nice addition.

Once the trimming and editing were done, exporting the video was easy. Then I pulled it off of the iPhone and uploaded it to YouTube.

Overall the experience wasn’t too frustrating and I can see using iMovie if I really want to trim a video or quickly montage several clips together.

Have you made any movies with your iPhone 4 yet? Post them to the comments!

P.S. Apparently some ideas are just too good to do just once.